Early this month I went to my favorite local restaurant, La Note, and noticed that the price of my favorite dish there, the Côte Nord (scrambled eggs and cream cheese on Acme levain bread, accompanied by rosemary-garlic home fries and Provençal tomatoes), had been given a price hike.  I started going to La Note in 2006, and I don’t remember what the prices were then, but I did find a copy of a menu from 2011.1102.  Back then the Côte Nord cost $12.95.  It now costs $18.00.  According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statis­tics, if the cost of this dish had followed the national infla­tion rate, today it would cost… $18.02.  So it seems that really it’s gotten ever so slightly cheaper! 

One thing that struck me, though, was that the amount of inflation varied wildly from one item to the next.  The coffee cake, $4.50 in 2011, should be $6.26 now, but instead is only $5.50.  On the flip side, the basket of pastries, $7.50 in 2011, should be $10.44 now, but instead costs every bit as much as the Côte Nord: eighteen dollars!  That said, four viennoiser­ies would cost over twenty dollars at most bakeries around here nowadays, so really the astounding thing is that as recently as 2011 you were paying less than two dollars per pastry at La Note.

I now have two desktop computers that I’m using for differ­ent tasks each day, but I got tired of going back and forth and back and forth plugging my buckling spring, 122-key Dvorak keyboard into whichever machine I happened to be using.  I ordered another buckling spring keyboard, a “New Model M”, but keys kept dying on me even after I sent it in for repairs.  While that keyboard was being shipped back and forth, I used a blank “Das Keyboard” I’d ordered back in the 2000s, but it was suboptimal: not only did the blank keys slow me down a bit, but even though it was supposed to be a clicky keyboard, it didn’t feel very solid.  I discovered that the Das Keyboard used blue Cherry MX switches, the second heaviest on offer… so I went looking for any key­boards that used the first heaviest, the green switches.  I found a grand total of one.  It only had eighty-seven keys, and I didn’t even know how much of an improvement the green switches would be, but I took a chance and ordered it.  As it turns out, I like the green switches quite a bit!  They make for a significantly more pleasant typing experience than the blue ones.

The class I’m auditing this semester is a survey of the history of Japan.  It looks like I’m the only one there taking notes using pen and paper rather than a laptop.  Normally in cases like these I sit at the front of the room so I don’t have a sea of screens in front of me, because I find that very dis­tracting, especially because students usually are not actually taking notes but instead are browsing Instagram or playing video games.  In this room, though, instead of a phalanx of seats facing forward, there are two curved banks of seats facing a central aisle.  I sit at the edge of one of these banks, which gives me an almost unobstructed view of the profes­sor’s slideshow: generally, I can only see one laptop screen, that of the young woman who sits at the edge of the row in front of me.  And so far she has spent almost the entirety of every class period… playing the Windows 3.1 version of Minesweeper.  And, y’know, I can’t even be mad!  I never played that in class, but back in my own college days, I spent many an hour in my dorm room sweeping those mines on a non-emulated copy of Windows 3.1.  It’s one of the very few games that I got really good at!

Speaking of games: a couple of years ago Youtube decided to feed me some Geoguessr videos, and that prompted me to give the game a try myself, and it turned out that I wasn’t too bad at it.  I got up to the gold level, and even racked up enough points to make it to the master level a couple of times, though once there I was invariably beaten back down to gold level with a quickness.  For those unfamiliar with Geoguessr, the basic idea is that you are plunked down in the Google Street View of a location, and you have to figure out where in the world you are by examining the architec­ture and natural scenery, reading the street signs, and so forth.  At least that’s the idea.  I got disenchanted with the game when I reached the point that the only way to improve was to memorize not just minutiae like what each country’s traffic bollards look like, but non-geographical stuff like the differences among the antennas on the Google cars sent to different regions, what year each place was visited, etc.  So when the site eliminated custom profile images and made users represent themselves with mix-n-match stump-legged digital figurines, I took that as a sign to give into my disen­chantment and stop playing.  But apparently there are now live Geoguessr tournaments, and Youtube fed me one of those, and it was actually pretty interesting to watch!  I guess that where sports are concerned, people generally would rather be spectators than put in time in the weight room.

One of the higher-ups at work put up a post explaining what we should do if we encounter technical glitches:

I thought that “EST” was an error, because Daylight Saving Time doesn’t end until November 3, but it turns out that even on September 30, EST is observed on Southampton Island, Nunavut (population 1035).  So I guess the assump­tion is that everyone who might encounter the glitches in question lives there.  And I was also pretty sure that every­where in the world that uses the Gregorian calendar, Sep­tember 30 is followed by October 1, but sure, happy 9/31 to those who celebrate!